Israel’s exit strategy

The 7,000 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip are supposed to leave or be removed this month, and their settlements destroyed. No one knows yet if it really will happen, given settler resistance and lack of army cooperation.

by Meron Rapoport

IT WAS very hot at the Bekaot checkpoint, halfway between the Jordan Valley and Nablus. A group of Palestinians arrived from the Valley, where they are agricultural workers in prosperous Israeli settlements at $9 a day. They had started work at 4am and were heading home to villages and towns in the Nablus area. But the soldiers at the checkpoint did not let them through and did not even bother to explain why. None of the soldiers spoke Arabic, except for tasrikh (permission) and ruh min hawn (go away).

The Palestinians waited quietly in the sun for the hour we watched the checkpoint, and no doubt they waited far longer than that.

All the soldiers in the Bekaot checkpoint belong to the Orthodox Regiment (Nahal Haredi), made up of the extreme elements among young settlers and other religious youth (including a small number of United States-born Orthodox Jews). On a watchtower overlooking the checkpoint an orange flag flew in the wind. Orange is the official colour of the anti-disengagement movement: the settlers and their supporters drape orange banners on their cars, wear orange T-shirts, and eat orange sweets.

“What is this orange flag doing here, in the army?”, I asked the soldiers. “We’re an anti-disengagement regiment,” explained one. “If we are asked to participate in the evacuation of settlements, 98% of us will refuse, including the commander. But I will not just refuse, I will do more than that”. He declined to say what, but other soldiers were heard saying that when the evacuation starts, they will leave the army, take their weapons and join the settlers’ struggle in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip.

Is Israel heading towards a civil war as a result of the disengagement scheduled to begin this month? Will the planned evacuation and destruction of the 20 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern part of the West Bank lead to a breakdown within Israeli society? Is the Orthodox Regiment, and other army units in which there is a high percentage of religious and rightwing soldiers, the basis for the creation of an Israeli version of the OAS (the French Organisation de l’Armée Secrete, which violently opposed Algerian independence)?

Most politicians and commentators say no. The army will not rise against the government; there will not be a local OAS; there will not be a civil war. This may be true, but it depends on how we define a civil war and on the real meaning of the disengagement plan.

The plan was the result of the internal and external pressure on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government, combined with Sharon’s own will to hold on to large parts of the West Bank (45%-55%). His adviser, Dov Weisglass, considered to be the architect of the plan, explained this clearly in his interview with Ha’aretz (1): “In the autumn of 2003 we understood that everything is stuck . . . There is international erosion [of Israel’s position], there is internal erosion, everything collapses, the economy is in a hellish state. And when the Geneva intiative appeared, it received wide support. And than came the letters of the officers, the letters of the pilots [who refused to serve in the occupied territories].”

According to Weisglass, Sharon decided to give up Gaza, which he had never considered as a national interest, to save the settlements in the West Bank and, more important, to prevent any negotiated agreement with the Palestinians. “The meaning of what we did is to freeze the negotiation process. And when you freeze the negotiation process, you prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and you prevent discussion on the refugee issue . . . The disengagement offers the right amount of formalin needed so that there will not be a negotiation process with the Palestinians.”

This is the credo of Sharon; it is the basis on which his plan is built. Until now, his plan has been working nicely. Despite the death of Arafat, who was regarded an obstacle to peace by the US and Europe, and the election of Mahmoud Abbas, the protégé of the US, Sharon has managed to avoid any resumption of political dialogue with the Palestinians. The “roadmap” (2) is still frozen, exactly as Weisglass predicted.

The “separation wall”, which the international court in The Hague has demanded that Israel demolish, putting Israel in a difficult position, is being built at high speed deep inside the West Bank, while the world looks away.

By the end of 2005 about 100 sq km of occupied Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, and some 200,000 Palestinians, will be surrounded by a nine-metre concrete wall. The construction of settlements in the West Bank, especially in the space between the wall and the Green Line of 1967, is continuing apace. The Central Statistics Bureau published a report a few weeks ago which revealed that construction in the West Bank rose 83% in the first quarter of 2005 (564 homes against 308 in 2004) while construction in the rest of Israel declined by 25% (3).

In her last visit in June, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, criticised Israel, but only mildly. She made no direct statement but her aides leaked her warning to unnamed Israeli officials that the US did not want the construction of the wall and the settlements “to become a problem”; it would become a problem if it continued, said the aides (4). This was not a warning that Sharon or Weisglass will have to worry about very much.

The settlers are faced with a dilemma. They are forced to fight the plan because the evacuation of Jewish settlements would be a dangerous precedent, since Israeli society’s taboo on removing settlements would be broken. At the same time they want to keep the settlements in the West Bank, where most of them live: there are only 7,000 settlers in the Gaza Strip, but 240,000 in the West Bank. They want to believe Sharon when he promises to increase settlement activity in the West Bank, but they know that the same Sharon who had said, after the 2003 elections, that “the fate of Neztarim (5) will be the fate of Tel Aviv (6)” is now planning to send the army to dispose of Neztarim.

This ambiguity led to talk of a secret deal or an unwritten agreement between Sharon and the settlers, who would demonstrate against the plan but would not topple the rightwing government, while Sharon would continue building the wall and the settlements.

“If Sharon bows down to the Americans and stops the construction in the West Bank,” says Benni Kashriel, mayor of Maale Adomim, a big settlement 15km east of Jerusalem, “he will see all the 240,000 settlers of the West Bank joining the fight against the disengagement.” That remark is between a deal and a veiled threat. Meanwhile the official leadership of the settlers, the Yesha Council, is keeping a low profile in the struggle.

Yet the struggle is becoming more intense. Demonstrations are now a daily sight, and calls for soldiers to refuse to serve in the evacuation of settlements come from the settlers’ movement. The first soldier who refused to participate in the evacuation (an incident shown live on television) has become a hero. But it is too early to tell if the settlers are heading towards an all-out confrontation with the army and the state, or if the current situation is just a show of force by the settlers, who still hope that they can stop the process, or at least turn the disengagement into such a public trauma that no one will think about tearing down settlements in the West Bank in the future.

The settlers are reluctant to have a full-scale confrontation with the Sharon government, because they, and national-religious supporters as a whole (7), are well placed within the state apparatus. Their ability to influence the policy of the organs of the Israeli state goes far beyond their political power in the Knesset, which is no more than 15 MKs out of 120. They are in high places in the ministries of education, justice and housing, and their presence is felt in departments dealing with the West Bank and Gaza.

The Civil Administration is the department within the army responsible for civil affairs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It is the body that locates lands for new settlements and is supposed to monitor unlawful building by both Israelis and Palestinians. This department, the most sensitive since it deals with the issue of land, is controlled almost totally by settlers.

This affects the whole policy of the Civil Administration. A high-ranking officer from it has revealed that, in 1998-2005, 2,500 warrants were issued for the destruction of illegal houses in the settlements, but none was put into effect. Meanwhile the body destroys 300 Palestinian houses each year. “The inspection department is very ideological, very rightwing, the head of the department is from a settlement near Ramallah,” says an ex-officer. “They would turn the lives of the Palestinians into hell and ignore unlawful construction in the settlements.” A recent judicial report showed that a network of settlers in departments and ministries has facilitated the construction of more than 110 illegal Jewish outposts since 1998 (8).

What is giving the army a headache is the high presence of settlers and national-religious soldiers in elite fighting units. Dr Yagil Levi, a sociologist from Tel Aviv University who wrote a book about Zahal (the Israeli armed forces) (9), says that about 15% of the soldiers in fighting units are national-religious, as are 50% of the low- and middle-ranking officers in some regiments. He explains that after the Lebanon war, the liberal, upper-middle-class Ashkenazi young, who used to form the majority of soldiers in the fighting units, lost interest in the army and therefore enlisted in far lower numbers. The national-religious young took their place. He says that the army command has found them to be the most loyal and reliable soldiers, especially in assignments in occupied territories.

So how can the army put pressure on them now? Many soldiers have expressed, unofficially so far, their intention to refuse to participate in the evacuation of settlements. As a result it has been decided that two important regiments, the Golani and Givati, will not take part in this operation because each has a high percentage of national-religious soldiers. Levi does not think that the disengagement will lead to major refusenik movement within the army, let alone to mutiny. He is more worried about what will happen after that.

If large parts of the army refuse to participate and if relations between the religious soldiers and their commanders put too much pressure on the army, the general command might ask the government not to send troops to evacuate other settlements. In that case the government would not have enough troops for disengagement stage two. “Disengagement two”, says Levi, “might also encounter armed resistance in the settlements in the West Bank, where some local army units are composed just of settlers and where there are huge amounts of weapons in private settlers’ homes. If there were to be an Israeli OAS, it would be there.”

Dror Etkes knows the national-religious world from the inside. He was born in Jerusalem, educated in a national-religious school and went into its youth movement, Bnei Akiva, an important element in the creation of the settlers’ movement. Now Etkes is the settlers’ fiercest enemy. He is the field officer for Peace Now in the West Bank and his job is to register every house built there and report it to the press, the US and anyone else who is interested. On a recent tour I made with him, a young rabbi in Ofra, a settlement north of Ramallah, told us that he prays for the death of people such as Etkes because he is spying on the Jewish people.

Etkes is aware of the infiltration of settlers into the army and other state organs, but he thinks their power is also the cause of their weakness: “The settlers’ days are over and disengagement proves it. They have created contradictions that they cannot resolve. If they use their power in the army, refuse to participate in the evacuation and wreck the disengagement plan, they will lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the Israeli public, a legitimacy they have worked so hard to gain. If they stay in the army and obey the evacuation orders, they will find themselves cooperating with the tearing down of settlements, for them the most sacred thing.”

Sharon is clever, according to Etkes, and he is using this contradiction. A few months ago he nominated General Yair Nave, the most high-ranking religious officer, to the command of the Central Front, responsible for the West Bank. “Sharon is forcing a man like Nave to choose, widening the gap between the extremists and the moderates within the national-religious camp . . . The disengagement is putting the settlers in a lose-lose situation,” says Etkes. The movement is doomed, and the disengagement is the first step.

But will Israel have the power to tear down big settlements such as Ofra, built 30 years ago? Etkes replies: “Maimonides said that you cannot have positive proofs for the presence of God, only negative proofs. You can only say what He is not. The same goes for Ofra. I cannot tell you positively how Israel will tear it down; I only know that Ofra cannot remain in its place.”

Professor Zeev Sternhal from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem does not come from a religious background, so he relies less on fate. But, like Levi and Etkes, he is confident that the presence of large numbers of national-religious soldiers in the army will not have a real effect on the chances of the plan.

“There are 10 soldiers for every settler so there are enough people to do the job,” says Sternhal. “Zahal will implement the policy of the government; it is capable of implementing an even more radical policy. We are not facing an Algerian situation. We do not have a gap between the professional army and the conscript army. Those who broke the army rebellion in Algeria were the conscripts, they did not respond to the call to rebel. If it had been left to the Foreign Legion, the result could have been different. We do not have a Foreign Legion.”

Sternhal is worried about something else. “Those settler elements within the army and the government will only get their way if they feel that the government is not resolute enough. The settlers will do whatever they can to discourage the public from supporting the disengagement, to win time. If they succeed in postponing it even for a short period, the whole project will probably collapse. If the army feels that the government is not in earnest, it will drag its feet, and we don’t have a civil system that can deal with the army.”

Sternhal points out that, only a few weeks before the beginning of the evacuation project, almost nothing is ready for the 7,000 people about to be evacuated. This leads him to suspect that Sharon does not mean business. “It’s a 50-50 chance that the disengagement will go through, it depends on the determination of Sharon and the Americans.”

After years of research the journalist Akiva Eldar and Dr Idit Zartal published a monumental book a few months ago on the history of the settlements. The Lords of the Land describes the extraordinary expansion of the policy, which they regard as criminal and dangerous.

Yet in their preface, they are optimistic: “Most of the settlements, including the oldest, seem fragile . . . The day Israeli society finds within itself the power to decide to depart from the territories it has occupied in war . . . on this same day the settlements will fall one by one.”

This is not where Wiesglass and Sharon meant to go when they embarked on the plan. But maybe history will lead them where they did not intend to go. Then will we see if we will have an Israeli version of Algeria.

(2) The “roadmap” adopted by the Quartet (UN, US, EU and Russia) on 20 December 2002 calls for an end to all violence, the withdrawal of Israeli forces to the positions held prior to the second intifada, a freeze on settlements, the reform of the Palestinian Authority and the continuation of negotiations aimed optimistically at creating a Palestinian state in 2005.

(3) Ha’aretz, 5 June 2005.

(4) Ha’aretz, 26 June 2005.

(5) A small settlement near Gaza City where a child, Muhammad al-Dura, was killed at the start of the second intifada.

(6) Ha’aretz, 24 April 2002.

(7) From the name of the National Religious party, a religious, Zionist party that used to be moderate, but radicalised with the war of 1967 and has since been the backbone of the settlers’ movement.